Woody Allen

Woody Allen, original name Allen Stewart Konigsberg, legal name Heywood Allen, (born December 1, 1935, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.), American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author, best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and the absurd but who also made weighty dramas, often with dark themes and bleak landscapes reminiscent of the work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman—who, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, influenced Allen’s work. Allen was also known as a sympathetic director for women, writing strong and well-defined characters for them. Among his featured performers were Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, with both of whom he was also romantically involved. By the late 1970s Allen not only was widely regarded as one of the world’s most-accomplished filmmakers but also was considered something of an American national treasure. The unevenness of his films in the 1980s and ’90s tarnished his reputation, as did some disastrous turns in his personal life, but he remained a significant, extraordinarily prolific filmmaker well into the 21st century.

Youth and early work

Allen Konigsberg grew up in Brooklyn in a family steeped in Jewish culture. He was especially close to his younger sister, who would later work with him as a producer. As a boy, he was enamoured of sports, magic, motion pictures, and jazz (taking up the clarinet as a teenager, though his musical idol was saxophonist Sidney Bechet). While still in high school, using the name Woody Allen, he began submitting quips to newspaper columnists—most notably to the nationally syndicated Earl Wilson. Before long, as Woody Allen, he was being paid to write jokes for entertainers. Stints by Allen as a student at New York University (as a film major) and the City College of New York were ended abruptly by poor grades and erratic attendance. In 1956 Allen began writing for television, and in 1958 he joined Sid Caesar’s writing staff alongside Larry Gelbart (later the writer-producer of TV’s M*A*S*H*) and Mel Brooks. In 1960 Allen moved to the Garry Moore Show. At this time he also began performing stand-up comedy at clubs in Greenwich Village, which led to guest appearances on television and to several comedy albums.

While performing stand-up in a nightclub in 1964, Allen impressed actress Shirley MacLaine and producer Charles K. Feldman, who gave him a chance to write the screenplay for the film What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), in which he also appeared. Allen made his first film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), by redubbing a James Bond-like Japanese action film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (1965), and shifting its focus to the pursuit of a top-secret recipe for egg salad. A year later Allen played Bond’s nephew in Casino Royale. In the meantime, he wrote a play, Don’t Drink the Water, which won acclaim on Broadway in 1966. That year also marked Allen’s first contribution to The New Yorker. Writing initially in the style of S.J. Perelman, Allen would go on to contribute dozens of sophisticated humour pieces to the magazine over several decades; these pieces were collected in books such as Without Feathers (1975) and Getting Even (1978).

Take the Money and Run (1969) was Allen’s debut behind the camera. An uneven but often riotously funny pseudo-documentary, it was cowritten by Mickey Rose and Allen, who starred as a hopelessly inept thief who apparently learned his trade from watching old Warner Brothers prison films. Made for under $2 million, the film did well enough to earn Allen a three-picture deal with United Artists Corporation, for whom he would continue to make films throughout the 1970s.

The 1970s

Before undertaking another feature film, Allen starred on Broadway from 1969 to 1970 in another play that he had written, the romantic comedy Play It Again, Sam. In the 1972 Herbert Ross-directed film adaptation of the play, Allen reprised his role as a shy film critic who seeks romantic advice from an apparition of Humphrey Bogart. Bananas (1971), the first of Allen’s directorial efforts for United Artists, starred him as a hapless, neurotic Manhattanite who is drawn into a revolution in a fictional Central American country. Though somewhat undisciplined, Bananas offered snatches of absurdist humour that rank among Allen’s funniest film moments.

Woody Allen, c. 1979.Keystone Archives/Heritage-Images/Imagestate

In Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), Allen satirized David Reuben’s popular sex manual with mixed results. Sleeper (1973), a far more cohesivesatire, featured Allen in the role of a neurotic health-food mogul who goes into the hospital for a simple operation and awakens 200 years later to learn that doctors had frozen him and that he is now a stranger in an even stranger land. Sex is forbidden—a notion inimical to any Allen protagonist—so he joins the rebel underground, whose leader is played by Diane Keaton (Allen’s costar in Play It Again, Sam). Love and Death (1975), a parody of Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, Sergey Eisenstein’s filmmaking, and a clutch of other landmarks of Russian culture, was less universally applauded.

After delivering an excellent “straight” performance as the protagonist in The Front (1976), Martin Ritt’s fine drama about Hollywood blacklisting, Allen made Annie Hall (1977), a breakthrough work that dramatically elevated his status as a filmmaker. An elliptical account of the rise and fall of a romance between the quirky title character (played by Keaton) and a comedy writer (Allen), it was Allen’s first attempt to blend genuine sentiment with his patented theatre-of-the-ridiculous. Although Allen denied its origins in autobiography, the poignant love story almost certainly mirrored some aspects of the real-life relationship that had transpired between Keaton and Allen. The film also marked the emergence of the distinctive on-screen persona that many came to believe was merely an extension of the offscreen Allen: a neurotic, erudite, wisecracking, moralistic, phobia-ridden pessimist who is obsessed with his mortality but finds solace for his existential despair in art and love and who is at base a mensch. Audiences and critics alike were charmed by Annie Hall, which won Academy Awards for best picture, best actress (Keaton), best director, and best screenplay (Allen and collaborator Marshall Brickman). Allen, however, astounded Hollywood by choosing not to attend the Academy Award ceremony but instead to play clarinet at Michael’s Pub in Manhattan, as he usually did on Monday nights.

Allen’s next film, Interiors (1978), was a carefully crafted homage to the weighty psychodramas of Ingmar Bergman. Abjuring humour, this tale of a dysfunctional family (starring Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, E.G. Marshall, Mary Beth Hurt, and Keaton) received a mixed reaction from critics, some of whom saw it as decidedly pretentious. Despite the film’s poor showing at the box office, Allen received Academy Award nominations for best director and best original screenplay.

Manhattan (1979) restored Allen’s covenant with his fans. Lyrically photographed (in black-and-white, by Gordon Willis), deftly written (by Allen and Brickman, whose screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award), and wonderfully scored (with music by George Gershwin), it was an ode to the city that Allen loved. The plot centred on the attempts by a television writer (Allen) to find a more meaningful career and a less confused love life—he is involved with a 17-year-old acting student (Mariel Hemingway) as well as with his best friend’s mistress (Keaton). More polished and less sentimental than Annie Hall, while possessing the depth of Interiors, Manhattan has some claim to being Allen’s best film, although it did not enjoy the broad success of Annie Hall.

The 1980s

In the 1980s Allen enjoyed the admiration of filmgoers, critics, and film industry professionals alike. Actors almost universally seemed willing to come to New York City at the drop of a hat to work with him for “scale” (the Screen Actors Guild minimum required compensation). Allen’s minimal direction of his actors was well known, and some performers fared better than others—though, by 2012, 15 different actors had received Academy Award nominations for their work with him. After a decade of working with United Artists, Allen switched the financing of his films to Orion Pictures. Producers Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, whom Allen followed from United Artists to Orion, continued to allow him the creative freedom to make movies his way: with relatively modest budgets, exquisite scripts that still left room for improvisation by actors, and intricately coordinated movement and cinematography that allowed for long takes so that much of Allen’s editing was done with the camera rather than in postproduction. The expectation was that his films would earn significantly more in foreign release than in the United States.

Stardust Memories (1980), in which Allen plays a filmmaker who is becoming increasingly contemptuous of his fans and his work, was apparently his attempt to wed the storytelling style of Federico Fellini (another of his idols) to his own particular vision. However, some critics found the film’s visual surrealism an uneasy companion to Allen’s familiar obsessions. Better received but unremarkable was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), a roundelay among six turn-of-the-20th-century vacationers (and an homage to Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night), which paired Allen on-screen with Mia Farrow for the first time.

Zelig (1983) created considerably more excitement, largely because of its groundbreaking use of period film footage as the backdrop for what is basically an amusing faux documentary (Robert Zemeckis would use an advanced form of this technique in Forrest Gump [1994]). Allen plays “human chameleon” Leonard Zelig, who has an uncanny ability to appear at the most critical junctures of history in the 1920s—listening to Adolf Hitler stir a crowd, watching Babe Ruth swat a home run—although he himself desires only anonymity.

Shot in black and white, the often zany Broadway Danny Rose (1984) was marred by an unevenness of tone. In it Allen played a marginal booker of oddball burlesque acts opposite Farrow, cast against type as a mobster’s girlfriend. Metaphysical musing is often central to Allen’s films, and in Broadway Danny Rose his character makes one of the filmmaker’s most epigrammatic postulates: “Acceptance, forgiveness, and love…that is a philosophy of life.” Charming but ultimately downbeat, The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) was the poignant story of a cinema-going Depression-era shop girl (Farrow) whose lacklustre life is enlivened when a swashbuckling actor (Jeff Daniels) literally walks off the screen and into her world.

After earning Academy Award nominations for the screenplays of Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen won that award for his next film, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a complex modern romance that examined the travails of three couples. Its superb ensemble cast included Farrow as Hannah; Michael Caine as her husband, who is smitten by one of Hannah’s sisters (Barbara Hershey); Dianne Wiest as another sister; and Allen, in a self-effacingly sweet performance as Hannah’s ex-husband. Radio Days (1987) was a nostalgic but rambling valentine to the New York City of Allen’s youth in the early 1940s and to the glory days of radio. Allen received yet another Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).KPA/Heritage-Images/Imagestate

While September (1987) was an unwieldy return to the psychodramatic territory of Interiors, Allen fared better when he took a Bergmanesque approach with Another Woman (1988), in which Gena Rowlands was superb as a philosophy professor who undergoes a life-changing epiphany. Much of the credit for the film’s impact was due to the contribution of Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer for many of Bergman’s greatest films. Allen’s hilarious contribution to the triptych New York Stories (1989)—“Oedipus Wrecks,” about an attorney whose nagging mother (Mae Questrel) transmogrifies into an omniscient spectre—was widely acknowledged to be the film’s strongest segment. Allen’s next project, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), ranks among his finest films. An ambitious Fyodor Dostoyevsky-like meditation on the nature of evil and culpability, it centred on Martin Landau’s portrayal of an ophthalmologist who wrestles with guilt after slaying his mistress (Anjelica Huston) to prevent her from revealing their affair to his wife (Claire Bloom). In counterpoint, Allen plays a married documentary filmmaker who lusts after a producer (Farrow).

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in “Oedipus Wrecks,” Allen's contribution to the film anthology New York Stories (1989).DeA Picture Library

The 1990s

Alice (1990), an extremely quiet film, received indifferent reviews, but it arguably contained Farrow’s best performance in any of Allen’s films as a wealthy woman who is sent down a fantasy rabbit hole by an ancient Chinese sage. After performing opposite Bette Midler in Paul Mazursky’s film Scenes from a Mall (1991), Allen made the Kafkaesque thriller Shadows and Fog (1991), which was generally regarded as forgettable.

By this point Allen and Farrow had long been involved romantically. Although they never married, they famously lived across New York’s Central Park from each other, shared the parenting of two of the several children Farrow had adopted, and had a son together. Allen’s life changed dramatically in 1992 after it became public knowledge that he and Farrow’s 21-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn were having an affair. Allen and Farrow split and were often in court as well as in the headlines as they fought for custody of their three children. Although Farrow’s allegations against him of child abuse were unproven, she won custody of the children, and Allen, whose films had established him as a paragon of virtue, was vilified by many as a hypocrite. His popularity with critics and filmgoers suffered significantly. In the wake of these events, Soon-Yi Previn became Allen’s third wife. (His first marriage had come at age 18, and his second marriage was to actress Louise Lasser. Both of those marriages had ended in divorce.)

In the midst of the media blitzkrieg, Allen finished making Husbands and Wives (1992), a darkly comic tale that revolved around a couple (Judy Davis and Sydney Pollack) whose impending split inspires their best friends (Allen and Farrow) to break up and seek new lovers. Although Husbands and Wives was admired by a number of critics, many of its considerable merits were overshadowed by the negative impact of the publicity surrounding the Allen-Farrow split.

The lighthearted Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) featured the return of Keaton as Allen’s leading lady, playing an amateur sleuth who stumbles into a Rear Window-like scenario in which she suspects that a neighbour has committed a murder. Bullets over Broadway (1994), which starred John Cusack as a Prohibition-era playwright who finds his first Broadway effort transformed through the interference of a mobster and the protests of a theatrical grande dame (Wiest), earned Allen an Academy Award nomination for best director. Praise was scarcer for the made-for-television version of Don’t Drink the Water (1994) that Allen directed and in which he starred.

As the decade progressed, Allen continued to release at least one film per year. Mighty Aphrodite (1995) benefited from a typically stellar cast and an especially strong performance by Mira Sorvino, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her work in the film. As a musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996) was something quite different for Allen. Moreover, he filmed his star-studded cast (Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts, and Edward Norton) not only in New York but also in Paris and Venice. In the darkly comic Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen played a writer who has used his own life as the basis for his art, much to the displeasure of his friends and family. Celebrity (1998) followed. Shot in black-and-white by Nykvist—with a cast that included Kenneth Branagh, Leonardo DiCaprio, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, and Joe Mantegna—the film looked great but was considered a minor entry in Allen’s oeuvre. In the more-focused Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Sean Penn turned in a memorable performance as a mythic 1930s jazz guitarist.

2000 and beyond

As a result of the erratic box-office performance of his films in the 1990s, Allen had found it necessary to seek independent financing for his projects. Small Time Crooks (2000) was a modest comedy starring Allen and Tracy Ullman as a married couple whose elaborate (but essentially absurd) bank robbery plan predictably goes off the rails. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), a B-movie tribute set in the New York City of the 1940s, was another slight film. Hollywood Ending (2002) was more ambitious, with Allen playing a washed-up Hollywood director who has to grovel to land a prestige assignment from the studio executive who also happens to be his ex-wife. The appropriately titled Anything Else (2003) was widely viewed as another misfire. More interesting though flawed was Melinda and Melinda (2004), in which Radha Mitchell starred in dual story lines as a homeless woman who suddenly appears on the stoop of an old New York friend requesting shelter. The film’s parallel story lines are woven in real time by two playwrights over a shared dinner, one giving the premise a comedic spin and the other fashioning it into a serious drama.

Match Point (2005) was a major departure and became Allen’s most celebrated film in years. A suspenseful Alfred Hitchcock-like meditation on the vagaries of desire and fate, by way of Theodore Dreiser, it starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as an upwardly mobile British tennis pro whose engagement to a wealthy aristocrat seems much less appealing once he gets involved with a voluptuous American actress (Scarlett Johansson). The primarily British cast and the deftly built suspense made this a most atypical Allen film.

Allen’s next two films were also made in England. Scoop (2006) found him working again with Johansson, but this time on a much lighter tale of skullduggery. The less well-realized thriller Cassandra’s Dream (2007) followed. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) quickly reestablished Allen’s momentum. It functioned simultaneously as a compelling romantic drama, a magnificent travelogue, and a deft comedy of manners. Javier Bardem played a supremely confident Barcelona-based artist and ladies’ man who seduces a pair of tourists (Johansson and Rebecca Hall); Penélope Cruz’s splendid performance as his combustible ex-wife earned her an Academy Award as best supporting actress. The film became one of Allen’s biggest hits ever, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide.

Whatever Works (2009) returned to the New York City setting of so many of Allen’s films. Larry David was magnificently irascible in a role that Allen might normally have played himself, a cranky Manhattanite who takes in a homeless teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) whose Southern roots soon begin to melt his granite heart. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) had a far more high-profile cast—Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Gemma Jones, and Frieda Pinto—but the multiple romantic roundelays here never seem to add up to anything of substance, despite an offbeat plot involving astrology and psychic consultations.

Critics had long seen Allen’s focus on upper-middle- and upper-class characters, often involved in the media, as limiting. Moreover, from at least the beginning of the 21st century, there were also critics who felt that Allen had simply lost touch with contemporary mainstream America. Midnight in Paris (2011) may not have shown Allen to be any more aware of life in middle-class America, but, as the biggest commercial success of his lengthy career to that time, it did demonstrate that he still knew how to appeal to the average filmgoer. It was a triumph with the critics too. Owen Wilson was perfectly cast as Gil, a bohemian screenwriter who, while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her insufferable parents, is magically transported back to the 1920s, when the Lost Generation reigned in the French capital. Gil has amusing philosophical conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dalí, but he becomes fixated on Pablo Picasso’s mistress (Marion Cotillard). The film earned Allen his first Academy Award nomination for best director in 25 years, and he won the award for his screenplay. (As usual, he did not attend the ceremony to accept it.)

The next installment in Allen’s informal series of paeans to the world’s great cities was To Rome with Love (2012). With a star-studded cast that included Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, and Ellen Page, as well as cinematography by Darius Khondji, it showed Rome to beautiful advantage, always recalling Fellini while presenting it through Allen’s fresh and uncynical gaze.

San Francisco was the locale for Allen’s next film, Blue Jasmine (2013), which starred Cate Blanchett as the wife of an unscrupulous investment banker (Baldwin). After her wealth disappears, she moves in with her blue-collar sister. Reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blue Jasmine took Allen’s work in a new direction as it confronted contemporary class-related issues. His script for the film earned him an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. It was his 16th nod for writing.

Allen appeared as a bookseller who becomes a pimp for his younger friend—played by John Turturro, who was also the film’s director—in the comedy Fading Gigolo (2013). Allen then wrote the book for a stage musical adaption of his 1994 movie Bullets over Broadway. The musical, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, premiered on Broadway in 2014. He next directed the film Magic in the Moonlight (2014), a romantic farce about a magician (Colin Firth) who attempts to prove that a psychic (Emma Stone) is a fraud. Set in the Côte d’Azur and peopled with an amusingly droll supporting cast, the film leavened its serious inquiries about faith and reason with lavish cinematography and generous doses of arch humour. Irrational Man (2015), an existentially comic thriller set in a New England university town, featured Joaquin Phoenix as a disillusioned and dissipated philosophy professor who decides to kill a family court judge after overhearing that he is likely to award parental custody rights to an undeserving father. Rousing him from a period of sexual and creative impotence, the decision fuels simultaneous liaisons with a student (Stone) and a colleague’s wife (Parker Posey).

In Allen’s Café Society (2016), Jesse Eisenberg portrayed a young New Yorker who goes to work for his talent-agent uncle (Steve Carell) in Los Angeles, where he becomes entangled with a secretary (Kristen Stewart) before returning to the Bronx to assist his gangster brother with running a nightclub. The film, Allen’s first to be shot in digital, was praised for its beautiful depictions of Los Angeles but was otherwise considered a somewhat minor effort. He then directed Wonder Wheel (2017), which starred Kate Winslet as a bored waitress on Coney Island in the 1950s who has an affair with a younger man, a lifeguard studying to be a playwright (Justin Timberlake).

In 2016 Allen ventured into television by writing, directing, and starring in the Amazon series Crisis in Six Scenes. He portrayed an elderly TV writer living in upstate New York who must contend with the social revolutions taking place around him during the 1960s.